A New Take on Satellite Broadband with John Gedmark

For his first Pathfinder podcast of 2023, Ryan took a field trip to San Francisco to visit the 120,000-square foot digs of Astranis.Today's episode is brought to you by Altek Space, a custom manufacturer of essential parts and components for rockets and satellites.*SNEAK PEEK*For the uninitiated, Astranis aims to build small, cost-effective GEO satellites that will beam targeted chunks of broadband service down to under- or unconnected parts of Earth.The company got its start in 2016 and graduated from Y Combinator’s winter batch the very same year. Two years later, Andreessen Horowitz (or a16z) wrote its first check to a space startup when it led Astranis’s Series A. The space internet startup would later go on to raise $250M from the likes of BlackRock, Baillie Gifford, and Fidelity (i.e., blue-chip growth investors).In the coming weeks, the satellite unicorn is preparing to launch its first MicroGEO satellite into a geostationary orbit roughly 22,000 miles above our head. That first MicroGEO bird will provide Alaskans with a significant connectivity boost.The company has a lot more cooking, Astranis CEO and cofounder John Gedmark tells us on today’s episode.Along with Arcturus, its Alaskan satellite, Astranis plans to launch four more on a Falcon 9 later this year. As we saw firsthand, Astranis is ramping up production and satellite testing at its sprawling facilities, which have housed World War II ship makers, Uber’s Advanced Technologies Group, and now, software-defined satellite makersDuring our Pathfinder recording, Gedmark also broke some news about a key executive that Astranis recently hired. Read on for more. What else did we discuss? The value of GEO vs. LEO, bringing connectivity to Machu Picchu, buying an entire Falcon 9 rocket, use cases for space-based internet, geopolitics…and plenty more. Before we let him go, John also shared his personal 2023 goal, an under-the-radar sci-fi rec, and a very fun fact with us.*CHAPTERS*1:10 - Guest intro2:01 - Astranis HQ4:58 - Vocab7:52 - Why GEO?13:01 - Applying to YC17:31 - The best Demo Day story you’ll ever hear21:43 - Tech stack27:13 - Engineering tradeoffs29:50 - Business model35:48 - Launching with SpaceX40:40 - A big new hire46:52 - Threat surface in GEO55:13 - Who is the competition?*SHOW NOTES*John’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/gedmark Astranis’ Twitter: https://twitter.com/Astranis Astranis: https://www.astranis.com/ Payload’s Astranis coverage: https://payloadspace.com/astranis-microgeo-testing-complete/ / https://payloadspace.com/astranis-arcturus-qa/ / https://payloadspace.com/astranis-and-telesat-strike-90m-deal-to-expand-connectivity-in-peru/*ABOUT US*Pathfinder is brought to you by Payload, a modern space media brand built from the ground up for a new age of space exploration and commercialization. We deliver need-to-know news and insights daily to 12,000+ decision-makers across commercial, civil, and military space. Payload began as a weekly newsletter sent to a handful of friends and colleagues. Today, we have three media properties and publish across multiple platforms. Our team is distributed across four time zones and two continents. We aim to inform but also educate and entertain, and we serve a highly concentrated audience of decision-makers in the commercial, civil, and military space sectors.While we have designs on becoming the biggest space content company in the galaxy, for now, we publish:1) Payload, our flagship daily newsletter, every Monday to Friday morning https://payloadspace.com/2) Pathfinder, this podcast, on Tuesday mornings3) Parallax, our weekly science newsletter for the space industry, on Thursday afternoons https://parallax.beehiiv.com/